February 18, 2021 — The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us many things, big and small. One of the unexpected insights is the fervor that exists for vitamin D. It’s a potent vitamin with many effects. Too little of it in a person’s body can cause any number of problems. Too much can be a serious problem as well. It […]
February 17, 2021 — Misinformation about COVID-19 spreads so fast that real information has a hard time keeping up. But what we face now is extra hard, because two other difficult subjects are in the mix – obesity and vaccines. So naturally, we’re seeing a mess in messaging about COVID-19 vaccines and obesity. As a matter of fact, the […]
February 16, 2021 — It’s easy and quite natural to respond to a chronic condition like obesity with a sense of doom. However, difficulty and impossibility are two different things. This is precisely why the myth of yo-yo dieting is so frustrating. The popular notion that springs from that myth is that losing weight is futile. Anyone who does […]
February 15, 2021 — This is not hard to see. But recognizing and dealing with effects of systemic racism in obesity care is not so easy. Black and Hispanic communities have a much higher prevalence of obesity and its complications. But they have much less access to effective obesity care. The outcomes for that care are worse in these […]
February 14, 2021 — Good cardiovascular health is simple, says the American Heart Association. Just follow Life’s Simple 7. It’s the AHA’s trademark guide to good health. Four ideal health behaviors and three ideal health metrics. The metrics are cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood glucose. The behaviors are eating healthy, being active, not smoking, and having a BMI less […]
February 12, 2021 — Once again, we see the impulse rise to catastrophize obesity. A new study in BMC Public Health offers up a comparison of deaths due to smoking and adiposity. So naturally, this sparks splashy headlines. Obesity kills more than smoking! Scary stuff. But not terribly helpful. Because the subtext of this sort of hype is finger […]
February 11, 2021 — A new study of semaglutide in the New England Journal of Medicine is causing quite a stir in the news. (If you can get past impeachment headlines.) In fact, both experts and headline writers are calling semaglutide for obesity a game changer. Meanwhile, the only sour note comes from the futility school of obesity care. […]
February 10, 2021 — High intensity interval training (HIIT) is hot right now. It mixes short periods of very intense exercise with less intense recovery. Even before the pandemic, interest in HIIT had grown dramatically. Then it spiked when pandemic lockdowns began. But a new RCT published yesterday in JAMA suggests that it might not be a panacea for […]
February 9, 2021 — Separate but (un)equal education was a concept the U.S. Supreme Court repudiated in 1954. However, separate and unequal healthcare is something that persists in the U.S. to this day. If you want a stark reminder, just take a look at the disparities in care that people get for obesity. Even more dire are the disparities […]
February 9, 2021 — Can a taste for sweetness predict how well someone will do after bariatric surgery? A new study in AJCN suggests that this may be so. In fact, this prospective observational study found two predictors of weight loss in a cohort of 96 bariatric surgery patients. One was an intense taste for sweetness. The other was […]
